Warning: Major spoilers for You season four, part one, ahead.
Well, that was different. Joe Goldberg is back, but he’s turned over a new leaf, shaping the minds of the next generation at a British university and doing whatever he can to avoid murdering the loves of his life.
In part one of You season four, Joe (Penn Badgley) finds himself on the other end of the serial killer equation, receiving nefarious texts from the “Eat the Rich Killer,” who recruits Joe to cover their tracks, while ingratiating himself with a group of insufferable socialites that would, frankly, have found themselves at the wrong end of Joe’s hammer in any other season of the series. Consider this his Pretty Little Liars era.
Instead of following Joe’s latest romantic whims, he finds the object of his desire, Marienne (Tati Gabrielle), relatively early in the season and… lets her go. What we’re left with is a delightfully meta whodunnit with just a touch of romance between Joe and the stubbornly stoic Kate (Charlotte Ritchie)—it’s still You, after all.
“There are certain things about the core of the show that are always the same. Basically, Joe and his desire for love and his tendency to mix up love and obsession,” creator Sera Gamble tells Glamour. But when executive producer Greg Berlanti suggested writing a murder mystery in rainy London for season four, all bets were off. “It did feel like a pretty radical left turn from the previous season. But that excited us—we love it. And we feel a deep responsibility to keep it fresh for our audience.”
She continued, “We got to be very meta with it. The beats of a whodunit are explained to Joe in episode two because we’re always overlaying several kinds of story structures: the romance, the thriller, and then in this case, the murder mystery.”
But even after we uncover the identity of Joe’s stalker in mayoral wannabe Rhys Montrose in episode five, Joe rejects Kate’s advances in the interest of breaking his own toxic relationship cycles. Is this growth? We spoke to Gamble about everything we’ve learned so far—and what is coming next in part two.
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